New Releases by Diane Ackerman

From Marginalian Editions comes a gorgeous reissue of celebrated poet, essayist, and naturalist Diane Ackerman’s debut collection: a whimsical and wonderful ode to our solar system, planet to planet, blending science and imagination, astronomy and cosmology, as well as fantasy, satire, myth, confession, and bawdiness galore. First published in 1973, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral introduced not only a splendid new poet but a whole new adventure in poetry. With bravura style, unbridled imagination, and a connoisseur's eye for precise scientific detail, Diane Ackerman gives us an unforgettable ode to each of the planets in our solar system, as well as for the moon, the comet Kohoutek, asteroids, and strange voyages to the stars, the bottom of the sea, through the human body, and into the mind. But The Planets is more than a book of poetry. It is also a major work on the solar system, illustrated with drawings and photographs of the galaxy. Diane Ackerman herself says: “I’ve always been baffled by people who write about nature only in terms of, say, junipers and cornfields, eschewing all things so-called ‘scientific,’ as if science were, per se, the spoil-sport of feeling. So wonderless a view of nature really doesn’t appeal to me; I don’t see the Universe divided up that way, into ‘The Junipers’ on the one hand and ‘The Amino Acids’ on the other.” Astronomy, fantasy, satire, myth, confession and bawdiness meet imagination and lyrical sweep to create this enticing collection, the world of The Planets.

Cinta memaksa Ovid menderita dan Stendhal disiksa dengan indah. Bagi Plato, cinta berarti kerinduan diri-kedua yang terbelah. Bagi ilmuwan zaman ini, cinta mungkin suatu koktail biokimia berisi oksitosin dan feniletilamin. Ackerman menjelajahi sejarah, sastra, biologi, dan budaya pop dalam mencari “yang maha tak terpahami.” Ia menyandingkan Cleopatra dengan Abelard dan Helois, Freud dengan Blade Runner. Ia mengeksplorasi daya tarik perselingkuhan, daya pikat afrodisiak(termasuk ramuan orang Romawi yang terbuat dari isi perut ikan busuk), dan kultus ciuman. Ia mengungkap rahasia para pencinta yang tak pernah terpuaskan seperti Casanova dan Don Juan sambil membuka trauma keseluruhan masyarakat yang kehilangan kemampuannya untuk mencintai. Ditulis dengan memikat, diungkapkan dengan indah, Sejarah Cinta adalah hal terbaik berikutnya bagi cinta itu sendiri, sebuah buku yang membelai, menggetarkan, dan menggembirakan. * “Ditulis dengan ceria, serius, puitis dan saintifik, diambil dari banyak sekali sumber, Ackerman telah meringkas yang maha tak terkatakan itu: cinta.” Los Angeles Daily News “Bahasa Ackerman sangatlah kaya selain juga sensual. Bahan yang dikumpulkannya dari lembar-lembar sejarah sungguh menggetarkan.” Columbus Dispatch

Eine wahre Geschichte aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg Während der Zweite Weltkrieg tobt, wird der Warschauer Zoo Schauplatz einer dramatischen Rettungsaktion, die über 300 Juden vor dem sicheren Tod bewahrt. Als Jan und Antonina Żabiński, der Zoodirektor und seine Frau, mitansehen, wie die Nazis in Polen einmarschieren, ist ihr Entsetzen groß. Die jüdische Bevölkerung wird im Warschauer Ghetto zusammengepfercht. Zeitgleich beginnen die Nazis den Zoo für ihre Zwecke zu nutzen, um ausgestorbene Tierarten rückzuzüchten. Als die Nazis den brachliegenden Zoo verlassen, nutzen die Żabińskis die Situation und schmuggeln Juden aus dem Warschauer Ghetto auf das Zoogelände, wo sie die Todgeweihten in den leeren Tierkäfigen verstecken. Sie retten ihnen damit das Leben. Ausgezeichnet mit dem Orion Award

Jan et Antonina Zabinski dirigent le zoo de Varsovie quand éclate la Seconde Guerre mondiale. La Pologne est envahie et bientôt règne la barbarie. Les animaux ont été tués sous les bombardements, envoyés à Berlin ou ont servi de gibier aux officiers allemands. Jan et Antonina se mettent alors à élever des porcs officiellement pour les troupes, officieusement pour nourrir les habitants du ghetto. Surtout, ils profitent d'un réseau de souterrains reliant les cages pour y cacher des juifs et les faire quitter le pays... Grâce au courage de ce couple, trois cents d'entre eux seront sauvés. Inspiré du journal intime d'Antonina Zabinski, ce récit retrace le combat d'un couple soucieux de la cause animale qui s'engage dans une lutte secrète contre l'oppression nazie. Un très beau portrait de femme, où l'abnégation et la générosité côtoient la cruauté et l'horreur.

Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the PEN New England Henry David Thoreau Prize. A dazzling, inspiring tour through the ways that humans are working with nature to try to save the planet. With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet Earth. Ackerman takes us to the mind-expanding frontiers of science, exploring the fact that the "natural" and the "human" now inescapably depend on one another, drawing from "fields as diverse as evolutionary robotics…nanotechnology, 3-D printing and biomimicry" (New York Times Book Review), with probing intelligence, a clear eye, and an ever-hopeful heart.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award "A testament to the power of creativity in language, life—and love." —Heller McAlpin, Washington Post It is a truism that lovers have their own language. And the love story—extending over more than forty years—of acclaimed writers Diane Ackerman and Paul West is equally a story of the love of language and its mysteries. In this heart-warming, uplifting memoir, Ackerman explores the brain’s ability to find and connect words—and of the latest science behind what happens when it fails to do so. Exposing both the terror of losing language and the giddy exhilaration of its recovery, Ackerman opens a window into the experience of wordlessness and testifies to the joyous necessity of wordplay for the health of both mind and spirit.

Diane Ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth. “Delightful . . . gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in.” —The New York Times

In a rare blend of scientific fact and poetic truth, the acclaimed author of A Natural History of the Senses explores the activities of whales, penguins, bats, and crocodilians, plunging headlong into nature and coming up with highly entertaining treasures.

A celebrated storyteller-poet-naturalist explores a year of dawns, drawing on sources as diverse as meteorology, world religion, etymology, art history, poetry, organic farming, and beekeeping.

The New York Times bestseller now a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain. A true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history. Drawing on Antonina’s diary and other historical sources, best-selling naturalist Diane Ackerman vividly re-creates Antonina’s life as “the zookeeper’s wife,” responsible for her own family, the zoo animals, and their “Guests”—Resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto. Ironically, the empty zoo cages helped to hide scores of doomed people, who were code-named after the animals whose names they occupied. Others hid in the nooks and crannies of the house itself. Jan led a cell of saboteurs, and the Zabinskis’ young son risked his life carrying food to the Guests, while also tending an eccentric array of creatures in the house. With hidden people having animal names, and pet animals having human names, it’s small wonder the zoo’s codename became “The House Under a Crazy Star.” Yet there is more to this story than a colorful cast. With her exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman explores the role of nature in both kindness and savagery, and she unravels the fascinating and disturbing obsession at the core of Nazism: both a worship of nature and its violation, as humans sought to control the genome of the entire planet.

Articles on the phenomenon of love based on history, literature, science, psychology, and personal experience of the author.

The true story of how the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw--and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Żabiński began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the Żabińskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants--otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes--and keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her.--From publisher description.

From the bestselling author of "A Natural History of the Senses" "comes a playful, rewarding jaunt through the brain's chemical realities and emotional intangibles" ("Kirkus Reviews").

At the heart of Origami Bridges is the delicate relationship of trust between analyst and patient, a relationship that grows out of the emotional give-and-take of the psychoanalytic process. In this collection, Diane Ackerman, with astonishing candor, lays bare her desires, anger, jealousy, fears, and anxiety, as she probes not only her present emotional landscape but also her past. And what gradually rises to the surface is an understanding of how the poet uses verse to purge her demons, express her delight, or confess secret longing, and through this process come to a better understanding of the self.

Poems about the five senses as manifested in such animals as the star-nosed mole, bat, bee, swan, fly, and cow.

Exploratrice sensuelle, à la curiosité sans limites, Diane Ackerman lève ici le voile sur l'univers secret et intime des jardins. Dans la veine de son succès mondial, Une histoire naturelle des sens, elle en célèbre les délices, et raconte, avec intelligence et volupté, ses incursions dans le monde des simples. Savourant chaque plaisir en chaque saison, fière de la profusion de ses roses, occupée à étêter des marguerites, à abreuver un oiseau-mouche d'un peu d'eau sucrée ou à étudier une limace, elle se réjouit aussi bien des drames innatendus, de la prodigalité ou du refuge qu'offre tout jardin. Elle en tient la chronique émerveillée, des accès de violence aux gestations mystérieuses, sans oublier le vacarme qu'occasionne le désir des criquets mâles dans les matins printaniers. C'est en aventurière de son propre jardin, situé sur la côte est de l'Amérique, que Diane Ackerman nous initie, avec précision, lyrisme et exubérance, à la grande sagesse encyclopédique de la nature. Un hymne à ce royaume éternel où nous attend le bonheur.

作者融合詩人與科學家特色,在本書中歌誦在自家花園裡瘦現的感官之樂與四時之美

In her first new book of poetry since Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman combines her deep understanding of the world with her immense passion for language to craft richly sensual poems that "honor all life/wherever and in whatever form/it may deal." Imbued with ravishing imagery, these exuberant and lyrical explorations of aging, longing, and death demonstrate Ackerman's full engagement with every aspect of life's process. Ackerman muses on the confines of therapy sessions, where she intersects "twice a week/in a painstaking hide-and-seek/making do with half-light, half-speak"; relishes the succulent pleasure of eating an apricot, with its "gush of taboo sweetness"; and imagines the "unupholstered voice, a life in outline" in her stunning elegy to C. S. Lewis. Whimsical, organic, and wise, the poems in I Praise My Destroyer affirm Ackerman's place as one of the most enchanting poets writing today.